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Slow Pace of Play Got you Down?
Everyone likes a fast paced game and NO ONE thinks they are the ones that play slow. So many clubs are putting in countdown clocks to time games--especially when sheets of ice are used mutliple times a day. Typically, a countdown timer will be set to 1 hour 50 minutes and when the timer hits zero the team finish the current end; or sometimes the current end is finished and one more end is played. Different clubs have different rules.
Fairbanks Curling Club decided to institute a timing system for the 2025 season. A few different options were explored. There are commercial LED clocks that can be synchronized and a four clock system would have been quite expensive. Fortunately, the company I contacted never got back to me with a firm quote, so I started looking elsewhere. A webbased solution from stagetimer.io could have worked well; but the free version was somewhat limited.
I had chatgpt build me a simple webserver using the esp32-c3 chips that are used in larryrocktimer. Here is the link to the sofware.
The wifi access point has the username: GAMETIMER
The password is: 12345678
Connect your device to this network and go to the ip address: 192.168.4.1
Connect a smart tv to the network or connect a dumb tv to a raspberry pi that is on the network. You can connect multiple devices and they will all be synchronized. So for about $100/display, this was a pretty nice solution.
Of course, Andy of Andybetterrocktimer had to make it nicer with a built in scheduling feature and a countdown to start feature and a color changing feature and a way to put sponsorship graphics feature. He basically recreated the fully feature stagetimer system. It's Nice! Maybe this helps a club out there looking to implement the same thing.
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